Talk of war and peace in North Korea

Tokyo: George Bush has vowed he will not be blackmailed by North Korea, while reaffirming determination to seek a "peaceful solution" to the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula.

As he argued for war on Iraq in his State of the Union address, the US President argued for a diplomatic solution for North Korea, saying "different threats require different strategies".

The strategy for North Korea is in part based on the ability of the heavily armed state to strike hard against US allies in the region - South Korea and Japan.

Talk of a peaceful solution won immediate support from Seoul, with a Foreign Ministry official describing Mr Bush's comments as "balanced and restrained". In last year's address, Mr Bush's inclusion of North Korea in his "axis of evil" stunned Seoul, which has a policy of engagement with the North.

"Throughout the 1990s, the United States relied on a negotiated framework to keep North Korea from gaining nuclear weapons. We now know that the regime was deceiving the world ...," Mr Bush said.");document.write("

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"And today the North Korean regime is using its nuclear program to incite fear and seek concessions. America and the world will not be blackmailed."

He said Washington was working with South Korea, Japan, China and Russia to find a peaceful solution.

But while Mr Bush was stressing peace, Pyongyang was talking up the prospects for war and rejecting efforts by third parties to mediate.

Its state-run news agency claimed the US had an elaborate invasion plan for North Korea. "The prevailing situation indicates that the US 'national security strategy' which calls for pre-emptive attacks on the DPRK [North Korea] has entered the phase of its implementation," the agency said.

North Korea reaffirmed it would only deal directly with the US, rejecting a proposal for several countries to mediate the conflict.

The "5 plus 5" plan was to have involved the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, and Australia, Japan, the European Union and South and North Korea.

South Korean hopes of achieving a breakthrough with an envoy to North Korea were also dashed when a meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, failed to go ahead.